What’s the strangest thing a commercial pilot can see from 30,000 feet? According to Captain Steve, an American Airlines pilot with 426,000 TikTok followers, the answer might surprise you.
In a recent Q&A segment, Steve addressed a question many nervous flyers have wondered about: “Have you ever seen a UFO?”
Not Your Traditional UFO
Steve’s answer was refreshingly honest. “Sometimes weather formations are a little weird,” he explained. “You know I think you’re getting after the ‘have you ever seen a UFO?'”
His response revealed something more unsettling than alien spacecraft: everyday objects that seem impossible at altitude.
“Not in the traditional sense of a UFO, every once in a while you’ll be flying and something will go right by you fast and usually it’s like a balloon, like there was a kid’s parade and there’s a helium balloon that goes by.”
The casualness with which Steve describes balloons at cruising altitude is startling. These objects have no business being that high, yet pilots encounter them regularly.
The Drone Problem
But Steve frightened his followers when he mentioned something more disturbing: “I’ve seen drones go by before. That’s disturbing.”
The implications are serious. Drones at commercial aircraft altitude represent a genuine safety hazard, yet they’re apparently common enough that pilots have learned to expect them.
Satellites That Move
Steve also described a phenomenon over the Canadian maritimes that sounds straight out of science fiction.
“When you fly through the Canadian maritimes, there’s a lot of those satellites and sometimes the sun hits them just right and they all kind of light up,” he explained. “All those satellites up and sometimes they come and go, depending on how the sun’s hitting them. And again, it might be black at night where you are but the sun is hitting them from all over here and can’t see the sun now.”
The satellites appear to move around, though Steve clarified they’re actually stationary. The illusion comes from how sunlight reflects off them at different angles.
St. Elmo’s Fire
The weirdest phenomenon Steve recalled was St. Elmo’s fire, a continuous electrical discharge that appears as blue or violet light on pointed objects during thunderstorms.
“St. Elmo’s fire… when you’re going through certain weather systems you’ll see it on your airplane and when you’re going through certain weather systems and you’ll hear it, and it looks like mad science,” Steve said.
“It’s like that across your screen and it’ll crack so loud but it doesn’t do anything to the windscreen.”
The atmospheric phenomenon is caused by intense electric fields ionizing the air, creating an eerie glow that pilots describe as both beautiful and unsettling.
What This Reveals
Steve’s casual discussion of these encounters reveals an uncomfortable truth: commercial pilots regularly witness phenomena that would terrify passengers. From rogue drones to impossible balloons to electrical discharges that look like something from a sci-fi movie, the skies are far stranger than most people realize.
While none of Steve’s sightings involve extraterrestrial craft, his testimony highlights how much unexplained activity occurs at altitude. The next time you’re on a flight, remember that your pilots might be seeing things you’d rather not know about.
